William Edwards Deming – Inventor of the Kaizen Principle

From Back to the Future Part IIIDoc: No wonder this circuit failed. It says “Made in Japan”.Marty: What do you mean, Doc? All the best stuff is made in Japan.Doc: Unbelievable.

Remember Datsun? Remember the Datsun B210? Wow, what a piece of crap. That thing would rust if you looked at it too hard. But then Datsun grew up. It grew up to become Nissan.

Here are the top 5 selling passenger cars in the US for 2017 (source):

Toyota Camry

Honda Civic

Honda Accord

Toyota Carolla

Nissan Altima

The Nissan Altima is on the list for very good reasons. It is an elegant car that has excellent resale value and is known for its trouble-free maintenance. What about the rest of the list? Notice something that they all have in common?

So what happened in Japan? How did it go from a perceived purveyor of low cost, poor quality products, to the economic powerhouse that provides of some of the world’s highest quality products?

William Edwards Deming is what happened.

How it Began

After World War II, Japan had basically been bombed back to the stone age. All of their industry was in shambles, their government had unconditionally surrendered, and the population would have starved if the US hadn’t interceded.

Along with the food aid we provided, we also sent representatives to help them rebuild their government (in our image), and economics professors to help them rebuild their economy (maybe that was a mistake on our part). One of the experts we sent over was named William Edwards Deming, and his ideas changed the world.

The sad thing is that Deming brought his ideas to the US government first, and we rejected them. It was probably just bad timing. His proposal was made during a time in American history when Quality was definitely not Job One. At the time, Quantity was the only thing that mattered, because we were in the middle of World War II. If there were quality issues in our factories’ production lines, we didn’t care. We made up for it with quantity. More guns! More tanks! More warships! If one or two of them didn’t work perfectly, then just grab another one off the shelf and get back to killing people!

And Deming was all about Quality. What’s more, he invented a practice that iteratively improved quality over time, allowing organizations who followed his theory to dominate the marketplace.

So after WWII, along with all the food, political advisors, and economists we sent to Japan, we also sent over a statistician named William Edwards Deming.

By the time Deming died in 1993, he had received Japan’s highest civilian award from Japan’s Emperor, and he had witnessed the beginning of Japan’s dominance of the American automotive market.

How can one man, one idea, one way of thinking, transform the world?

Continuous Improvement

Deming’s concept was that it was everyone’s job to continually make incremental improvements in everything we do. All the time, never ending, always improving. Japan took this concept to heart, to the point where any factory worker was authorized to (indeed, they were expected to) walk off the factory line, pull an automotive engineer into a conference room, and show the engineer how making a tiny change in the car’s design would save 5 seconds on the factory floor. Or 3 seconds. Or 1 second.

They weren’t revolutionizing the design, they were making small, incremental improvements, and they were doing it continuously.

This is how the company that made the Datsun B210 grew up to make the Nissan Altima.

Kaizen

In Japanese, the word Kaizen means “improvement” or “change for the best”. Kaizen is the term most commonly associated with the Deming Continuous Improvement Cycle. The Deming Cycle can be summarized as Plan->Do->Check->Act.

Plan

What Deming taught was that you must first come up with a Plan. You must then write up the plan. Yes, for the Deming Cycle to work, you must actually write stuff down!

Literally sit down and write “If you change the hiring process so that the form filled in by the hiring manager doesn’t include the field Expense Center, the hiring manager will save 1 minute filling out the form. That information can be more quickly looked up by the HR person processing the form because they have a comprehensive lookup table for Department to Expense Center codes. The overall savings in the on-boarding process will be a net gain of 30 seconds per new hire (1 minute saving from the hiring manager – 30 second cost by the HR department = 30 seconds net saved).”

Do

Put what is in the Plan into effect.

Do everything that is in the Plan.

Don’t do anything that is not in the Plan.

Check

See if the expected results as defined in the Plan are achieved.

Act

Act by reacting to results achieved by implementing the Plan. Did you discover other areas where you can achieve efficiencies? Did implanting the Plan uncover additional steps you could have taken? Guess what? It’s time to write up another Plan.

4 Responses

The impact Deming has had on management of organisations and their processes should be made part of curricula for teaching those who want to become Executives. The article should be read by Deming deniers..